Developing the Leadership Team in an Entrepreneurial Venture: A Case Focusing on the Importance of Styles

In today's competitive environment strongly influenced by increasingly new issues and perspectives, entrepreneurial business firms must be focused on leadership team-building. The purpose of this treatise is to present a conceptual case-based analysis of this team-building process, focusing on the importance of leadership styles within an entrepreneurship. Team-building implies mentoring and enhancement whereby members of a leadership team aze nurtured and developed in important ways. A key element of this process is the paradigm of individual leadership styles represented in the team which, in turn, reflects the many different ways by which the individuals involved behave, communicate, adjust, and respond to each other. Two interactive dimensions at the heart of an individual's behavior assertiveness and responsiveness are foundations of that person's leadership style. The basic interactive dimensions of assertiveness and responsiveness thereby form the two axes of the framework of the leadership styles paradigm, the four primazy quadrants of which represent the four styles Analyzer, Director, Creator and Connector. Having identified these four basic leadership styles, this analysis then focuses on the case situation within which the strengths and weaknesses of each of the styles are identified, communication preferences aze discussed, primary backup styles that come into focus due to high levels of stress are analyzed, and the all-important skill of style flex is described. It is not enough just to understand a person's leadership style or the style of others in an entrepreneurial leadership team; one must also seek to adapt the skills of style flex that can enable the pazties to function in a mutually beneficial situation congruent with the needs of the individuals and the organization. These dimensions are illustrated in association with the case of MedTech, Inc. (a pseudonym), along with observations relating to the authors' experiences in several other arenas that have been encountered in entrepreneurial consulting activities.